Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a privilege to be part of this meeting today. Thank you very much for your invitation.
Today I'm going to share my own immigration journey to Canada and talk about the results and recommendations of my graduate student research.
My name is La Trinidad. I'm a Philippine national currently residing in Duncan, British Columbia. I hold a Master of Education in teaching English to speakers of other languages, and am currently completing my Master of Arts in language and literacy education at the University of British Columbia.
I teach immigrants and refugees in a rural setting. As a 35-year-old woman I am employed, I am advancing my education, and I am giving back to my community. I have two teenage children. My son is learning to play the violin and the flute, and my daughter has made it to her school's volleyball and basketball teams. They have been volunteering at the society and teaching new immigrant and refugee children.
My Canadian partner of almost seven years is a retired assistant school superintendent and a very loving house husband. Who do you think is taking care of the kids today? We pay our taxes. We get child care benefits. I could go on and on about how my life seems to be as mundane as everyone else's. I might as well complain about the weather, but the thing is, I wish my life had always been this boring.
Growing up in the Philippines was tough. My memories of school not only include understanding concepts and memorizing prayers, but also mastering wading through floodwaters while keeping my books dry. When I went to university, my daily 16-kilometre commute took almost two hours every day because of traffic. I dared not complain to my mother about all these things since she had survived Marcos's martial law.
My father was working in Hong Kong then so I didn't want to worry him either. We had everything we needed until somebody got sick. In the Philippines I was fighting natural, political and economic elements on a daily basis. The search for a better life outside the country seemed to come intuitively.
A few years after I finished university, I thought it was time to move out of the Philippines. I was married then. The children were still very young and the bills were piling up. We considered moving to the U.S. but the complexity and costs associated with the application process turned us off. After that we visited a Canadian immigration consultancy firm, but after we were assessed, they determined that we did not have enough points to get to Canada.
In December 2006, my husband at that time responded to a job ad to work in the United Arab Emirates, and after six weeks, he was gone. Nine months later, we arrived in Dubai as permanent residents. As you can imagine, it was extremely hot in the Emirates, but for six years, I had lots of tax-free income as a college instructor.
When my marriage ended and I found my partner, I left the U.A.E. In 2012 my partner and I moved to Thailand, and I studied Thai for a year on a student visa and then my work visa allowed me to teach English at Chiang Mai University. We had no firm plans to come to Canada until my partner was offered a job in Vancouver. I applied as an international student at UBC and then had to apply for a visa at a processing centre in Bangkok. After spending three months putting together the application, I was accepted in a diploma program at UBC, and my visa was approved in two and a half weeks. I arrived in YVR in June 2014.
I enjoyed the academic rigour at UBC and desired to stay permanently, so five months after my arrival, I lodged my PR application as a common-law partner living in Canada. Before going to classes, and between assignment submissions, I filled out more forms, collected documents, sought the help of our MP, Alistair MacGregor, and phoned the IRCC. The whole application process was a full-time job.
Finally, on May 19 of this year, I became a permanent resident and my children were able to join me in July.
In my master's thesis, I documented the home literacy practices of a Philippine child whose mother worked as a caregiver worker in Canada. I observed the child at home, collected artifacts and conducted some structured interviews for a period of six months.
My study aims to contribute to the literature and literacy practices of adolescent immigrants in Canada. It has a potential to provide information to parents, settlement workers in schools and classroom teachers about who these adolescents are and how to best support their needs.
The results of my study revealed a lot about the identity and community of this immigrant child. For the purposes of this meeting, let's call her Maria. She spends a lot of time studying alone at home. She's an award-winning artist and works part time to help her parents pay the bills. Her immediate community consists of Philippine friends and family living in Canada, followed by Philippine friends and family living in the Philippines, and finally, teachers and school counsellors in her school here in Canada.
It took her a while to realize what she really wanted to take at university as there was pressure to continue the path her mother had taken to become a caregiver worker just like her mother. In spring this year, she finally decided to take a degree related to medicine, but she had to delay her application to go to university because she didn't have the two prerequisite courses needed to get into the program. She had to miss a year of school, so for now she works full time at a fast-food chain.
In this study, one of my recommendations includes the strengthening of settlement programs for youth. This means giving guaranteed sufficient funding for the kind of work that settlement workers in schools do. These immigrant children are the future citizens of Canada. They should get all the support they need, including career planning, after-school and summer programs, and navigating the school and university systems in Canada.
Maria has a chance to become a very successful individual given the qualities that she already possesses. However, she's encountering setbacks that could have been avoided if she had been given timely support by settlement workers.
In summary, people's immigration to Canada can be long, painful and confusing. When they get here they need all the support to become part of the fabric of Canadian society. As I mentioned in my research, some youth need special supports so they can get reacquainted with their parents and get to know Canada.
Thank you very much.